


Unique

by teztime



Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-15
Updated: 2017-01-15
Packaged: 2018-09-17 18:09:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,129
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9336698
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/teztime/pseuds/teztime
Summary: Pipes has a talent for narrowly avoiding death, but what about all of those times he didn't avoid it?





	

**Author's Note:**

> Secretsolenoid gift for Computronus. THANKS, MUSHDAD.
> 
> This is set entirely in the universe of [Transformers: Lost and Found](http://lostandfound.riverdark.net/wiki/Main_Page), an MTMTE RP, about his character, Pipes. Hope you like. <3

The Lost Light got up to a lot of weird things. It's just what they did. If someone had told Pipes that the Lost Light had set out to get into the weirdest, stupidest misadventures rather than find the Knights of Cybertron, he wouldn't just believe them, he'd tell them they had no idea and launch into a story.

But even for them, this was pretty weird.

Pipes stood in a chamber at the heart of a dying Metrotitan. It had been dying for millennia, and they found it too late to save it. It had been scavenged and torn apart to become the base of a space station and served as a major trading hub for thousands of species in this part of the galaxy. It was bittersweet to know that even as the titan faced death, so far gone that it couldn't even speak to say farewell, it still supported a riot of life on its surface.

Once, long ago, the titan had carried a colony from Cybertron. The colonists were adventurers and explorers, and when Pipes imagined being among them during the golden age of Cybertron, venturing forward to explore a strange and mysterious galaxy, his spark whirled in joy. But when he onlined his gaze, rather than a crowded ship filled with eager adventurers, he saw an empty room on a dying titan.

He took in the spare, stark chamber, empty of the colonists who should have been here. They had vanished, leaving behind only a strange artifact. The rest of the crew was busy elsewhere on the colony cleaning up a disaster that definitely wasn't of their making -- this time -- that had involved a bunch of alternate reality duplicates of theirs with bad paint jobs.

Weirdest, stupidest misadventures.

Pipes faced a disk that swirled with a mist of a thousand colors, all softened into a distant gray smoke. He and some others of the crew had come in here earlier, before all the fighting broke out, and everyone had caught a glimpse of other selves, of what they might be doing in other realities, but when Pipes stepped up it had only clouded over and then show him an image of himself, looking down at the disk.

He held a hope in his spark that there had been too many other people before and hurried back as soon as he had a chance to take another look. But now that he faced it, he felt like his feet had been welded to the floor.

It was hard to take that last step.

Pipes flung himself forward. It was harder than facing Overlord, but he did that, damn it, and he could do this. He grasped the disk by the sides and watched the soft mist stir, as if blown by a fierce wind. He waited.

And waited.

And waited.

Again, he saw only himself.

"Why is this thing broken? Maybe if I--" Pipes released the disk and stepped back, then snuck up on it from behind and looked down over the top. After a slight pause, the mist stirred again, almost reluctantly, and offered up the same image of himself, now upside-down.

"No! Come on! You showed everyone else! Why not me?"

Pipes let go, stepped back, approached again, and tried it from every side and even -- with some wiggling, a minor transformation, and an extended mirror to let him peek around the side -- from below, but no matter what he did, all he ever saw was himself.

Sitting in front of the disk, watching the clouds stir, Pipes rested his head in his hands and offlined his eyes. There were infinite realities out there, and in each of them a near infinite number of worlds, and he didn't know how to face the idea that in all of that, there might only be one of him. It seemed a heavy weight, and his shoulders slumped.

"Hey! I wondered where you were." Tailgate's voice called out from behind and Pipes straightened with a startled clank.

"I was just -- getting ready to move this!" Pipes rubbed his knuckles over his faceplate, making certain no light was leaking from the band of his visor as he turned. "We're taking it back to the ship, right?"

"Well, someone's taking it back to the ship, but probably not just us. That looks heavy." Tailgate looked at the disk and then back at Pipes. For a moment, all Pipes could remember was the strength of Tailgate's duplicate, with his strange colors and his temper tantrums, and then the image cleared and he saw his friend again in the clean white and friendly cyan he'd come to recognize. "Are you okay?"

"I'm fine," Pipes said by reflex, then, more honestly, "I don't know." He looked past Tailgate to the disk and asked, "What do you see?"

"Uhm--." Tailgate turned and the disk swirled, throwing up a dozen, a hundred images of him, flickering almost too fast to see: a lot of them were of Tailgate still beneath Cybertron's surface, but some were of him in strange, cramped tunnels, or pushing large bins, and a few were of him in the middle of crazy firefights, being just as heroic as Pipes had come to expect.

"I don't know," Tailgate said, his visor large as if to take in everything that flickered past them. "It's so hard to see. What about you?"

"Watch." Pipes stepped ahead of Tailgate and the flashing images faded away, showing only the swirl of mist.

"What's that mean?" Tailgate asked.

Pipes was very quiet as the image on the disk settled to show them both standing there, looking down at themselves, and onward into infinity. "I think I'm the only one."

There was a quiet then, a hush broken only by the soft rasp of their ventilations.

Then: "Wow, I bet Rodimus would be pissed!"

"What?" Pipes asked, turning to Tailgate in surprise.

"You know, that means you're special. The only you. The one, the only: PIPES." Tailgate threw his hands up in a wide gesture. "And he's probably still Hot Rod in like ten million universes."

Pipes had to laugh at that, because Tailgate was right: Rodimus would totally be mad about that. "I guess."

"Anyway," Tailgate went on, his arm around Pipes's shoulder as he drew him away. "Who cares about what's in there, when you've got us out here. We already know you're the one and only."

Pipes saw his other friends out in the hallway, all at work helping repair the damage that had been done to the station. As he and Tailgate joined them, he felt the weight lift from his shoulders, and his spark lightened. Maybe it wasn't so bad being the one and only, because at least he wasn't alone.


End file.
